Rod Steiger

A renowned character actor who never liked that label, Rod Steiger left his mark on 1950s and '60s Hollywood with forceful performances in such critical favorites as On the Waterfront (1954) and The Pawnbroker (1964), culminating in an Oscar for In the Heat of the Night (1967). Despite myriad health problems and less sterling job offers from the 1970s onward, Steiger never stopped acting before he passed away in 2002. Born on Long Island, Steiger was raised in New Jersey by his mother after his parents divorced. Dropping out of high school at 16, Steiger enlisted in the Navy in 1941, serving on a destroyer in the World War II South Pacific. Returning to New Jersey after his 1945 discharge, Steiger worked at the Veterans Administration and joined a civil service theater group where one of the female members urged him to make acting his career. Along with using his G.I. Bill to study at several New York schools, including the Actors Studio, Steiger began landing roles in live TV plays in 1947. Over the next five years, Steiger honed his formidable Method skills in 250-plus live TV productions, as well as on Broadway. Though he appeared in the movie Teresa (1951), Steiger didn't fully make the transition to film until his award-winning performance as the lonely title character in the 1953 TV production of Paddy Chayefsky's Marty, which helped him nab a part in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront. As Charley Malloy, Steiger most memorably shared the backseat of a cab with screen brother Marlon Brando as Brando's ex-boxer Terry laid the blame for his one-way trip to Palookaville on his corrupt older sibling. Though Kazan had guided Steiger to his first Oscar nomination, Steiger later condemned the Academy's controversial decision to award Kazan an honorary Oscar in 1999. After On the Waterfront, Steiger made his presence felt as a movie tycoon in his erstwhile TV director Robert Aldrich's Hollywood tale The Big Knife (1955), a scheming attorney in Otto Preminger's The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955), and the villain in Fred Zinnemann's adaptation of Oklahoma! (1955). Further underlining his effusive talent and his intense (if occasionally overwrought) screen style, Steiger co-starred with Humphrey Bogart in Bogart's final film, The Harder They Fall (1956); survived Samuel Fuller-style Western sadism as an Irish-accented ex-soldier in Run of the Arrow (1957); played a psychopath in Cry Terror! (1958); and raged as Al Capone (1959) (Steiger's Capone was later credited as the inadvertent model for Robert De Niro's performance in The Untouchables). Steiger still occasionally acted on-stage, including Orson Welles' unusual adaptation of Moby Dick in 1962. Nevertheless, Steiger concentrated mostly on movies, with his career taking on an international flavor after he married his second wife and Broadway co-star, Claire Bloom, in 1959. After appearing in the low-key British drama The Mark (1961), Steiger joined the impressive Hollywood all-star cast re-staging of D-Day in the war epic The Longest Day (1962). He returned to films after his 1962 theater hiatus as a dishonest politico in the Italian film Le Mani Sulla Città (1963). Steiger's forays into Italian movies preceded two of the best years of his career. In Sidney Lumet's groundbreaking independent drama The Pawnbroker, Steiger's powerful performance as a Holocaust survivor running a Harlem pawnshop earned the Berlin Film Festival's Best Actor prize in 1964 and garnered raves upon the film's 1965 U.S. release. That same year, Steiger also gleefully played the asexual embalmer Mr. Joyboy in Tony Richardson's outrageous comedy The Loved One (1965) and had a small part in David Lean's blockbuster romance Doctor Zhivago (1965). After his banner year resulted in a much-desired Best Actor Oscar nomination for The Pawnbroker, Steiger lost to Lee Marvin. The outcome was different for his next American film, the acclaimed racially charged police drama In the Heat of the Night. Starring oppo

What do you want me to do, come over and cry with you? Well to hell with your crying.

Sol Nazerman

Do you believe in God Ortiz?

Jesus Ortiz

I don't know Mr. Nazerman but you believe in God, and I'd make book on that.

Sol Nazerman

I do not believe in God, or art, or science, or newspapers, or politics, or philosophy.

Charley Malloy

You know, it's time to think about getting some ambition.

Terry Malloy

I always figured I'd live a bit longer without it.

Pa

There will be no Devil's play in this house!

Charley Malloy

You're getting on. You're pushing 30. You know, it's time to think about getting some ambition.

Terry Malloy

I always figured I'd live a bit longer without it.

Police Chief Bill Gillespie

I got the motive which is money and the body which is dead.

Pasha Strelnikov

Monsieur Komarovsky; I hope I don't offend you. Do people improve with age?

Pasha/Strelnikov

Monsieur Komarovsky; I hope I don't offend you. Do people improve with age?

Komarovsky

They grow a little more tolerant.

Pasha Strelnikov

Because they have more to tolerate in themselves.

Pasha/Strelnikov

Because they have more to tolerate in themselves.

Police Chief Bill Gillespie

Your not going to do nothing. Your just going to stand there and shut up.

Christopher Gill

" That doesn't make me a bad person ."

Christopher Gill

That doesn't make me a bad person.

Napoleon

I have come back to make France happy! I am France and France is me!

Napoleon

Well, they've done it. All the great powers have declared war against me. Not against France -- against me!

Marshal Michel Ney

They honor you by making you a country.

Napoleon

Honor? They deny me the decency of law. They make it legal for any clown to kill me!

Juan Miranda

I know what I am talking about when I am talking about the revolutions. The people who read the books go to the people who can't read the books, the poor people, and say, "We have to have a change." So, the poor people make the change, ah? And then, the people who read the books, they all sit around the big polished tables, and they talk and talk and talk and eat and eat and eat, eh? But what has happened to the poor people? They're dead! That's your revolution. Shhh... So, please, don't tell me about revolutions! And what happens afterwards? The same fucking thing starts all over again!

Juan Miranda

I know what I am talking about when I am talking about the revolutions. The people who read the books go to the people who can't read the books, the poor people, and say, 'We have to have a change.' So, the poor people make the change, ah? And then, the people who read the books, they all sit around the big polished tables, and they talk and talk and talk and eat and eat and eat, eh? But what has happened to the poor people? They're dead! That's your revolution. Shhh... So, please, don't tell me about revolutions! And what happens afterwards? The same fucking thing starts all over again!

Napoleon

Never interrupt your enemy while he is in the process of making a mistake.

Sol Nazerman

Next to the speed of light, which Einstein tells us is the only absolute in the universe, second only to that, I rank money.

Police Chief Bill Gillespie

Just once in my life, I'm gonna own my temper. I'm telling you that you're gonna stay here. You're gonna stay here if I have to go inside and call your chief of police and have him remind you of what he told you to do. But I don't think I have to do that, you see? No, because you're so damn smart. You're smarter than any white man. You're just gonna stay here and show us all. You've got such a big head that you could never live with yourself unless you could put us all to shame. You wanna know something, Virgil? I don't think that you could let an opportunity like that pass by.

Father Bolen

What is it, Father?

Father Delaney

I can't see...I'm blind.

Father Delaney

I can't see. I'm blind.

Father Bolen

I believe that...that I know about fear. I've seen it. I've experienced it.

Father Bolen

I believe that, that I know about fear. I've seen it. I've experienced it.

Father Delaney

I wish you'd make your point. I've got a lot of things to do.

Father Bolen

My point is I believe we create our own demons in our own minds.

Father Delaney

Oh I see. We're just gonna walk away from it. Has that become the fashion now, to cover up?

Father Ryan

Nothing to walk away from.

Father Delaney

I think it's nonsense!

Father Ryan

There's nothing to cover up.

Father Delaney

I think it's bureaucratical bullsh*t! What do you think I am? I am not some pink cheat seminarian who doesn't know the difference between the supernatural and a bad clam. I am a trained psychotherapist! I went into that house! What I saw there was real, what I felt there was real, and what I heard there was real! Gentlemen, I have a family in my parish that's at great risk! And they are facing real danger.

Father Delaney

I happened to check into the murders and the 20-year-old boy who killed his parents and his four brothers and sisters. When he was at trial, he testified that he heard voices in the house. The voices told him to do it! I was in the house, and I heard the voices, too! And I also felt the presence in the house. There was a presence in that house!

Father Ryan

Half the killers in this country say the same thing. "The voices. The voices told me to do it."

Father Ryan

Half the killers in this country say the same thing. 'The voices. The voices told me to do it.'